Design Explorations to Support Learner’s Mental Health using Wearable Device and GOAL application

Abstract

Increasing the number of patients with symptoms of depression makes maintaining Mental Health concern in many societies calling for global attention. In children, stress and depression have a detrimental effect on their developmental emotions and physical health. From the perspective of a student, daily stress can affect their learning activities. Hence, to tackle this issue, it is necessary to develop their ability to manage mental health. Self Direction Skills (SDS) can support to develop such an ability. Current wearable devices can acquire physical activity and physiological data to compute stress levels, and sleep quality. While it makes it possible to visualize the amount of stress received in daily life, no such program is linked to the daily learning life of a student. To fill in this gap we extend our earlier developed GOAL system which already synthesizes students’ physical activity and learning data and explores possibilities of integrating internet-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (iCBT) with our previously proposed DAPER model as an applicable method to deal with daily stress in academic life. We use the wearable devices to automatically track stress levels, and map activities of training students’ mental health managing ability to the DAPER phases. Students can make a plan in the GOAL system to reduce stress by selecting a cycle of practice as suggested by iCBT. To inform our system design we conducted a pilot study with 120 students at a junior high school level. This paper presents an exploratory data analysis of 60 students, whose learning performance from english and mathematics courses and stress levels over 133 days were collated.